Deeplinks Blog posts about Mass Surveillance Technologies

There has been plenty of bad news when it comes to NSA spying, so it’s encouraging when the news is good. At the end of May, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology signaled the beginning of the end for NSA’s effort to undermine encryption, passing an amendment that extricates the NSA from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) work on encryption standards.

In September of last year, ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times broke the story that the NSA had systematically “circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling” that protects the Internet, “collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products.”

June 5, 2013 was when the world heard from Snowden. This year, it's your turn to speak out.

On June 5, 2013 the Guardian newspaper published the first of Edward Snowden's astounding revelations. The secret court order that conclusively showed that the US government was collecting the phone records of millions of innocent Verizon customers. It was the first of a continuous stream of stories that pointed out what we’ve suspected for a long time: that the world’s digital communications are being continuously spied upon by nation states with precious little oversight.

Twenty-three governments have come together this week for the 4th annual Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) conference in Tallinn, Estonia—a meeting where FOC members work together to "coordinate their diplomatic efforts and engage with civil society" in order to advance Internet freedom worldwide.

Rumors of the extent of Ethiopia’s digital surveillance and censorship state have echoed around the information security community for years. Journalists such as Eskinder Nega have spoken of being shown text messages, printouts of emails, and recordings of their own telephone conversations by the Ethiopian security services. From within the country, commentators connected growing telecommunications surveillance to the increasing presence of Chinese telecommunications company ZTE. Externally, analysis of the targeted surveillance of exiled Ethiopians have turned up surveillance software built and sold by Western companies, such as FinFisher and Hacking Team.

The NSA has seen the future of mass surveillance, and it appears they believe that the future lies in malware. Earlier this week, The Intercept reported on a series of slides and memos leaked by Edward Snowden describing the NSA's "more aggressive" approach to signals intelligence, which circumvents encryption such as web browsing via HTTPS and email using PGP, by installing spyware directly onto targets' computers.